


Fire and Ice: Legends of Tomorrow

by nirejseki



Series: Fire and Ice [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Canon-Typical Everything, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, M/M, spoilers through 1.13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:34:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where Mick is the brains and Len is the brawn, they still get recruited to join Rip Hunter's team of Legends on the Waverider.  Unsurprisingly, everything still goes horribly wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire and Ice: Legends of Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> The tone of this fic shifts along with the show, so, uh, beware of canon-typical violence and angst. As usual, the story jumps back in forth in time.

“You won’t be heroes,” the man from the future said, face glowing. “You’ll be _Legends_.”

Mick rolled his eyes. Who cared about being a legend? He had a good crew, a home base he actually liked, a city at his feet. Hell, he even got to plan the odd heist or two: when they got away clean, no one knew it was them; if they were caught, by this point the mayor was extremely forgiving and assumed they had to have some sort of legitimate reason to take whatever they were taking.

(Mick would like to state for the record that at the time they took the diamond, he had no idea they would actually need it to drill through some super-tough meta-human’s hide two days later. _No idea_.)

He turned to Lenny, eyebrow arched, ready to share in the joke, only to find Lenny staring at the guy with an excited glow on his face and a bit of ice crackling between his fingers.

Mick glanced around. He didn’t know haircut guy or blondie, but Jax and Stein were his, and he remembered Kendra (he remembered Carter Hall, too; that guy’d better hope that Lenny _doesn’t_ remember him.) Jax was looking skeptical, but Stein had the same expression Lenny did.

Since the crazy person vote on any team generally outweighs the sane vote, it’s looking more and more like they’re going on a road trip. Probably for the best that he attend; he doesn’t even want to think about the havoc someone like Lenny could wreck on the timeline if he wasn’t being watched over. Plus, it’ll cheer Lenny up after that whole fiasco with his dad a while back - Len does love his science fiction, after all. 

_Ugh_ , does that means he’s going to have to find a babysitter for the Flash team?

Speaking of which, it was now officially past eight and neither Mick nor Len had checked up on the hero-side. Mick’s lips twitched and he ignored what the jackass in the duster was saying, opting to listen for the familiar approaching rumble. Lenny’s got that grin on this face that means he’s thinking the same thing.

Less than three minutes later, a streak of lightening split the sky as the Flash jump-tackled future guy from the next building over.

Haircut guy jumped in surprise. Blondie and Hall each reached for a weapon. Firestorm reached for each other, then stop when they realize what’s going on.

“Hey, Flash,” Mick said slowly, looking with amusement at the dumbfounded and perturbed expression on future-guy’s face. “It’s okay. You can let him up.”

“He _kidnapped_ you!”

“S’okay, kid. It’s just a job offer.”

Barry slowly removed himself, still glaring. Then he looked over and brightened. “Hey, Professor Stein! Jax! How’ve you been? Boss didn’t say he was calling you in.”

“ _Boss_?” the future guy squawked. 

“Something tells me those history books ain’t too specific with what they say about us,” Len drawled in an aside to Mick. “Somehow I’m not too surprised. Mick, I think you ruined Mr. Hunter’s presentation.” 

Mick crossed his arms and smirked. 

“He shouldn’t have stepped around in _my_ city, then.”

\---------------------------------

Mick shook himself awake with a huff, flinching at the brightness of the light. He was on the jump ship – shit, Kronos. Kronos had come onto the Waverider; he’d shot Rip, shot Stein, then gone after Mick. He must be Kronos’ prisoner now. Mick’s hands were bound together, legs too; he was attached to the railing and the chances of him getting out weren’t looking too sweet. How had Rip described Kronos – a ruthless bounty hunter, fanatically loyal to the Time Masters, with reputation for having a considerable disregard for collateral damage and a sadistic tendency to bring his bounties back with a few pieces missing. Mick tugged futilely at the futuristic cuffs. Well, at least he wasn’t missing any pieces yet.

He heard the whisper of movement behind him and he twisted as much as he could. Kronos walked past him to the panel, gloved hands typing in some command. The man’s armor was thick and bulky, but Mick had seen him twist and bend and still shoot with deadly accuracy, so Mick wasn’t going to underestimate him. 

Didn’t mean he appreciated being ignored.

“What do you want with me?” he asked.

Kronos stilled.

“You left Rip and Stein behind,” Mick continued, eyes narrowing. “I thought Rip was your target, so why go after me? I deserve to know that much.”

“You deserve many things.” Kronos said, his voice mechanically distorted yet strangely sibilant. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

Mick stopped, the apprehension in his chest sinking into something much more foreboding. This didn’t sound like business, he could have worked with that; no, this sounded personal. But what could he have done to Kronos…?

Kronos turned to him and lifted his hands to his helmet, detaching it with the hiss of filtered air.

Mick’s heart froze in his chest. 

Lenny’s face, savage and wild and familiar, stared back at him from within Kronos’ suit.

“I thought you were supposed to be the smart one,” he said, voice rough with disuse and being trapped in that suit, but so, so familiar. Mick knew that voice better than any other; he was accustomed to being able to read Len like a book, a novel in each word and gesture and stance. But he could read nothing from this Len. _Kronos_.

“How…?” he whispers. 

Len arched an eyebrow at him. “You know how. You left me behind, Mick; you picked a nice little spot and washed your hands of me.”

Mick’s whole body twitched in absolute negation. “I was coming back for you,” he protested, knowing even as he said it that it was too late. The time paradox was set – he couldn’t go back now, couldn’t cross the timeline. The Len he had dropped off less than a week ago with empty promises was gone, replaced with this stranger. “I was _always_ coming back.”

Len studied him, eyes solemn, no quick smile of bitter amusement, no snarl of incipient rage. “But you didn’t, Mick. You left me there, and there was nothing there – no people, no food, barely even any water. I was reduced to eating _rats_ by the time the Time Masters came for me.” He tilted his head to the side. “Even my dad remembered to feed me.”

Mick took the blow as it was meant, as a dagger twisting deep in his gut. “The Time Masters…what did they do to you?” Because this wasn’t his Len. The ever-present violence was still there, of course, but the casual inhumanity that sometimes reared its head in Len’s darkest moment was now all that could be seen. He wasn’t even an animal any more. He was a _machine_.

“They took me to a place called the Vanishing Point,” Len said. Just said it, language crisp and clear without the slightest hint of a drawl. Christ, they’d even taken that dorky Central City slums accent that Len had never been able to shake. “Time doesn’t pass there the way it normally does. I’ve lived _lifetimes_ , Mick; you can’t even imagine. The Time Masters tore me down until there was nothing left, and then they built me back up.”

“Yeah?” Mick said, starting to get angry at the cold recital. Len sounded _indifferent_ to him – that had never happened, not once, and that more than anything else could not be borne. The thought of Len suffering at the hands of the Time Master was unthinkable, unendurable; he couldn’t think about that now. “They give you a lobotomy while they were at it?”

“I’m still me, Mick,” Len said, turning away to type in some additional commands. “You think they had to force me to hunt you down? I _begged_ for the opportunity.”

“You know they’re going to throw you away when they’re done with you, right?” Mick said desperately, trying anything that would make an impact in the wall of ice that now surrounded his partner. “Not much call for bounty hunters that’ve finished their job…”

Len didn’t even look at him. “Even if they do, they’ll be in good company.” 

“The Waverider has been located,” the computer said in monotonous tones. It was still Gideon’s voice, but a Gideon who’d had the personality ripped out by the stem. Mick knew that wasn’t natural to the jump ship; no, that was all Len – just two weeks ago he’d snarled a threat to that effect at the main console on the Waverider when Gideon had refused him access to some information he’d wanted. Two weeks ago.

 _Lifetimes_ ago for Len.

“If you’re going to kill me, I’d prefer to get it over with,” Mick said, fighting down the nausea that had swamped him the second he’d seen what was under that helmet. His fault. He’d brought Len on this godforsaken trip. He’d left him behind instead of living up to the responsibility Len had entrusted him with, all those years ago. 

“I’m not going to kill you, Mick,” Len said, tugging lightly at his gloves. _Gloves_. Len hadn’t worn gloves since the particle accelerator had turned him into a meta; he said it interfered with his abilities. 

Kronos had never been known to use ice as a weapon. 

“What, planning on torturing me first?”

“No, Mick,” Len said, entirely unperturbed. “I have other plans for you.”

“We are now closing in on the present location of the Waverider,” the soulless Gideon announced. “Nanda Parbat.” 

“League of Assassins,” Len observed, reaching for his helmet. “Come along, Mick; you wouldn’t want to miss the fun.”

The cuffs around his ankles unlocked with a gesture, and Mick was forced to walk forward, hands still shackled. It wasn’t even at gunpoint; he didn’t resist. His body felt light, almost absent. Shock. He knew the symptoms, but it didn’t help with overcoming them. The horror of being party to such destruction was too much for him.

They should never have left Central City. Len had been happy there. 

The fight inside the League of Assassins was short and brutal. Ra’s Al Ghul had sent his assassins – including Sara, apparently, though she seemed to have switched sides back by now – against their crew, but Len was quick and merciless, shooting at assassin and former teammate alike. He got Kendra in the wing, broke one of Ray’s arms, but he didn’t shoot at them as Rip ordered a desperate retreat to the Waverider; just followed casually along, even covering their retreat, even as Sara burdened herself with assisting Mick back.

Mick didn’t understand. What was the plan here? Why would Kronos hunt them, only then to turn around and start to help them? 

Did Len even have a plan? That had always been Mick’s job. 

“You helped us escape,” Ray said, clutching at his arm. “Why?”

Rip was frantically typing coordinates and ordering Gideon to take off, but once they were safely in the air he turned to the silent bounty hunter standing calmly in the center of the bridge. “I will admit I am also curious,” he said, reaching for his gun.

Kronos shot him in the hand and Rip cried out in agony.

All the Legends, who had been starting to relax at their narrow escape, tried their hardest to overcome their exhaustion and pull themselves back into fighting form. 

“No!” someone cried out. Mick realized a second later, as everyone looked at him, that it must have been him. “Don’t attack him.” He looked at Kronos, unreadable behind his mask. “Show them.”

A hiss of releasing air; a creak of leather and metal.

“Leonard?” Sara cried out first, closely echoed by Jax and Ray. Kendra just stared wordlessly, mouth agape.

“Mr. Rory, I see you exaggerated when you said you took care of him,” Rip said, still bent over the smoking wreck of his hand.

“Never said I killed him,” Mick said bitterly. “I was _going_ to go back for him.”

“No need for any of that,” Len said calmly. “I’m here now.”

“And what are your plans, exactly?” Jax said, Stein’s voice seeping through as he echoed what the other man must have said. 

For the first time since he had taken off that helmet, for the first time since 2046, Len smiled. It was a grotesque parody of a smile, a skull’s face shining through with dead eyes, a man who had forgotten what the emotion behind smiling was supposed to be, or even that any emotion was required at all. It was the most disgusting thing Mick had ever seen in his life.

“I’m here for Mick, of course,” Len said. “He forgot me for a little while, but now I can follow him anywhere he wants to go.”

“You…want to kill him?” Sara said cautiously.

“Why would I want to kill him?” Len asked. “He’s my boss. I knew the Time Masters would let me go after you one day if I played their game, so I did, and I was _very good_ at it. They wanted to hold my leash, but there’s only one person who gets to do that. I’m here and I’m not going to be left behind again.”

“You want to rejoin the team?” Ray said, startled, still clutching the arm Len had broken. Everyone else was similarly dumbstruck.

“Not the team,” Len said, lips still stretched in that damned grimace he was trying to pass off as amusement. “But if that’s what he wants, that’s what it’s going to be. Anything Mick wants, Mick gets.”

And then he started laughing, and there was nothing sane in that laugh. Nothing human to come back down to, no fit of rage that Mick could wrestle him out of – just the cold broken shards of madness, the high pitched whine grinding against the inside of Mick’s skull even as everyone else took an instinctive step back.

“Isn’t that right, boss?” the thing that had once been his best friend asked him.

Mick turned away and threw up on the deck.

\-------------------------

“I’ll back Raymond up with the Russian chick,” Len said definitively, spinning a top made of ice. Mick admired it silently; Len was getting really good with those powers of his. Rip made a face not unlike that of smelling some rotten eggs. 

“No, Mr. Snart. I have another mission in mind for you – one more suitable to your, ah, particular talents.”

“Just because I like to freeze people doesn’t mean I don’t have other talents, Rip,” Len shot back with a toothy grin. “Besides, you already have one assassin on board. I’m going as Raymond’s wingman.”

“Mr. Snart, you are not in charge of this operation.”

“No, but I don’t take your orders, either,” Len drawled. “Just Mick’s. What say you, Mick? Think I can handle some flirting in the frozen north?”

“Seems like just your speed,” Mick replied with a smirk. “Don’t worry about it, Rip; he can be very charming when he wants to be.”

Kendra burst out in giggles, only to try unsuccessfully to hush herself when Len looked over at her with a grin he reserved for members – even only part-time members – of the STAR Labs team. “What, are you doubting me?”

She laughed. “No, no, you’re right, you’re _very_ charming.” 

Ray looked at her like she’d temporarily misplaced her sanity. 

“No, really!” she protested. “I was his barista for a while. He was always very, very nice when he was picking up coffee in the morning.”

“She’s not wrong about that,” Jax chimed in with a grin. “The only time I’ll talk to Cold is right after his first cup but before his second, when he’s too tired to take a stab at anyone.”

“I’m never too tired to take a stab at anyone,” Len sniffed.

“No kidding,” Kendra said with a smile. “I was just remembering the first time you met Carter.”

“I assume you’re referring to the incident when our Captain Cold froze Mr. Hall’s wings after his attempt to kidnap you?” Stein said dryly. “Truly a highlight of Leonard’s charm.”

“He tried to kidnap you?” Sara asked.

“He had his wings, I didn’t. He actually pushed me off a building so I could learn how to use my wings,” Kendra recalled. 

“No offense to the dead and all that, but that’s a pretty dick move,” Sara said. Ray nodded.

“That’s what I said!” Len interjected. 

“No, you said, ‘Just because a girl’s made a bad decision two hundred times before doesn’t mean she can’t do better this time around’, if I recall correctly.”

Mick snorted. “Yeah, Len did say that, didn’t he?”

“I still can’t believe you ditched Ramon for the birdbrain,” Len said.

“Cisco was very sweet and I liked him a lot,” Kendra replied. “But he’s also _in love with your sister_.”

Len looked pleased. “He’ll be good for her,” he said contentedly. “Do you know how hard it is to convince her to date someone who isn’t a criminal?”

“Gee, I wonder why,” Sara shot back. 

“I think we’re all getting away from the point,” Rip interrupted. “Which is the mission at hand. Mr. Palmer will be going after Ms. Valentina; I highly doubt he requires back up. If he does, I believe that an adequate ‘wingman’, as you call it, would be–”

“Len can go,” Mick interrupted steadily. “It’ll be good for him; he needs to stretch his legs.”

Rip glared at Mick and Mick gazed back steadily. 

“Hey, Jax,” Mick said, still staring at Rip. “You and Stein should gather your stuff, you’re going to accompany Rip here when he goes to explore the…time anomaly, was it? We don’t want to risk that Kronos character catching up with anyone unaccompanied, and you’re the strongest we got if Len’s off getting his flirt on.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Jax replied. “C’mon, Grey, you can follow up that lead in the factory later on, after they’ve finished with Miss Russian Scientist.”

Kendra shifted her weight a little, drawing a little closer to Mick. 

Rip’s eyes narrowed as he took in the tableau – Mick before him, Kendra firmly on his side after he’d helped save her from Savage in Central and Starling a few months back, Jax and Stein already moving on his command without checking in with Rip, Len’s menacing form perched on a table right behind him. Even Sara and Ray, who along with the now-deceased Carter were the only ones that weren’t Mick’s from the start, hadn’t stepped forward to back Rip the way Mick’s team had. While Carter had been alive and exerting his influence on Kendra, they had been more balanced, with Mick unwilling to press his suit too hard until he had the full measure of his opponents. But with Sara and Len finding (entirely unexpected) kindred souls in each other and Kendra returned to the fold, Rip was in no position to make a stand and he knew it.

Unsurprisingly, and with very little grace, he conceded. “Very well, Mr. Snart, since you so much enthusiasm for the project, you may accompany Mr. Palmer,” Rip said, clearly trying to pretend that giving in was all his idea. “But do _not_ interfere or disrupt Mr. Palmer’s efforts.”

Len blatantly ignored him, turning ostentatiously to look at Mick.

Mick inclined his head to the side. “Get the job done, Lenny,” he ordered.

Len grinned and hopped off the table. “Whatever you want, boss.”

Mick turned back to Rip. “Any other suggestions before they go?” he inquired. 

“No, I think that’s it,” Rip replied, gritting his teeth. He waited until everyone else had started to head out before reaching out to try to catch Mick by the arm. Mick gave him a look that had Rip quickly removing his hand. “Mr. Rory,” Rip began. “You do recall you are on this trip to assist me in saving the world, correct? If you continue to question all of my orders–”

“I’m not questioning your orders,” Mick said affably, but firmly. “But I don’t take them either; not me, and not my crew. I’m on this trip because Kendra, Stein and Lenny all wanted to go, and I wanted to make sure they didn’t mess up history too bad. But as long as you remember who my people are, and who they answer to, I’m sure we’ll find some way to work together.”

Rip didn’t look like he enjoyed swallowing that one, but he didn’t have much of a choice. 

“Very well, Mr. Rory. Shall we proceed as partners, then?”

Mick studied him. The proposal appeared in earnest. 

“Sure. Partners.”

\-------------------------------

“If this Per Degaton kid’s that much of a problem, I can always kill him,” Len offered. “It’d have a timeline impact, of course, but if Mick wants it…”

Mick glared at him. “No killing kids, Lenny,” he said tightly. It’d been one of the first rules they’d come with, the two of them, back when they were starting up; Lenny had had Lisa to worry about, and he’d asked Mick to make sure he never lashed out at her or anyone like her. Even though she’d barely counted as a kid by then, Mick had agreed; he’d never seen the need for violence against kids, who were by and large innocent. If you couldn’t plan a job that didn’t rely on hurting kids who didn’t hurt no one, you were a bad planner, in his view. Mick wasn’t going to let that stupid ‘cycle of violence’ shit his shrink sometimes spouted at him go anywhere; Len was violent, of course he was violent, and yeah, sure, he was even violent against his loved ones sometimes, when he was uncontrollably angry, but he wasn’t his father. Mick had promised him he’d make sure he never would be.

Len blinked. “Huh, really? Why’s that?”

“Because I said so,” Mick replied shortly. He didn’t want to discuss it. 

Len shrugged. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Sara watched Len warily, as she had ever since she’d emerged from the depths of her training with the League of Assassins. She and Len had bonded early on in their travels through time, surprised to find someone else who seemed to understand the uncontrollable fury that itched beneath their skin – plus both of them had an obscure fondness for card games. Not at day went by on the Waverider when they didn’t pass some of their free time with some of the most vicious games of gin rummy that Mick had ever seen in his life. He hadn’t been aware that bloodlust could be sublimated into card games, but after watching a few games, he’d told Gideon that no matter what Rip thought, the Waverider was _never_ going to Vegas. 

The deck of cards hadn’t been touched since Len’s return. 

“You know, you missed a real good opportunity there,” she said cautiously.

Len looked at her. No smile, no frown, just a raised eyebrow.

“You could have offered to _ice_ him,” Sara said, smiling a little. Mick’s frown deepened. She had a point; it wasn’t like Len to miss an opportunity for that. Len didn’t respond, ignored her entirely, just turned his gaze back to Mick. It’s what he did when he wasn’t doing something _for_ Mick – just stared _at_ him through dead, hungry eyes. 

“You want me to find a way for you to use your powers in the next job?” Mick asked Len. “Maybe against Raymond’s robots?”

“My gun’s more efficient,” Len replied. “Especially against electronics.”

Mick’s fists clenched under the table. “It’s not what’s more efficient, Lenny, there are more factors at play than just efficiency,” he said, his grip on his temper as fierce as he’s ever had to have it. “You love ice.”

“Ice is inefficient,” Len repeated blankly. “I don’t understand what other factors you feel are necessary to weigh. But if that’s what you want…”

Rip swept into the room. “Now that we’ve determined Savage’s angle, it seems evident that we need to remove Per Degaton from assuming power. Mr. Snart, since Ms. Lance is concerned about relying about what she learned with the League of Assassins, I think we might be able to use your newly developed skill set for–”

“I don’t kill kids,” Len said.

Rip stopped, looking skeptical. “Since when, exactly?” he asked. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard such a restriction in Kronos’ resume.”

“Mick said so,” Len replied. “So I don’t.”

Rip frowned. “Mr. Rory, I don’t see what the difficulty is – Mr. Snart’s time with the Time Masters has given him access to a broad variety of new talents; we would be remiss if we did not take advantage of the opportunities offered by the asset we have been given…”

Mick didn’t even make the decision to move, but a second later he was standing over Rip’s fallen body, having hit him in the face with as solid a right hook as he could manage. 

“My partner is _not_ an asset,” he snarled, then pulled himself back together with an effort of will. “I don’t care what ‘new talents’ he’s picked up. He’s a person. And he listens to _me_.”

Sara looked a little approving. Len watched them all indifferently. 

“We’ll help you pick up the kid,” Mick decided. “But we’re not killing him. You want to do that, you get that blood on your own hands.”

Rip nodded stiffly and turned on his heel, heading out. Sara shot them both a worried look. Mick glanced at her. “Can you keep an eye on Rip?” he asked. “I thought we’d agreed earlier that we weren’t killing the kid, just kidnapping him, but if he was planning on going with that, he shouldn’t have asked Len to help.”

Sara nodded and slipped out the door after Rip, quiet as a shadow. Normally, Mick would spare a second to feel pleased at the new addition to his team, which Sara was heading towards quickly, but he still felt empty. About as empty as the expression on Len’s face. 

_For what will it profit a man if he gains all of space and time and forfeits his soul?_

They should have stayed in Central City.

Too late for that now. Even with time travel, the only way to move was forward. “Come on, Lenny,” he said. “You’ll be the distraction for the guards while Rip pinches the kid, okay? And we’ll go play with the robots after that.”

Len nodded, but made no move to rise from where he was.

It made sense; Mick needed to go gear up, but Len – Len was never _not_ armed now, his gun and a myriad of other weapons ranging from knives to grenades always somewhere on his person. The Time Masters had turned his hard-learned wariness and caution about the world into a paranoia so complete that Mick wasn’t sure he even slept without them. Even more than when his cold gun had sunk underneath his skin, Len was a walking weapon. 

The grab went out without a hitch. Len was inexorable, Kronos the destroyer in action; the guards would have been dead within minutes if Mick hadn’t ordered Len to aim to disarm. Rip headed off with the kid in the jump ship, heading back to the Waverider with Sara on his tail to see how the timeline had been affected.

“You know it won’t change anything, right?” Len asked him, settling next to the spot on the nearby roof where Mick had watched the action happen, calling the shots from where he was. 

“Kidnapping the kid?” Mick asked, putting the binoculars aside. “Why not? If he’s the one that helps Savage take over…”

“The timeline only registers changes if you’re willing to do it,” Len said dismissively. “Once you rejected my offer to kill the kid, you left it in Rip’s hands. He won’t be able to do it in the end, which means that no matter what he does over the next few hours, the timeline won’t change. Gideon will tell him that, but he won’t understand that it all hinges with him. He’ll angst about it for a while, wear a few holes in the floor, maybe even go threaten to kill the kid, but he won’t follow through. So no change.”

Mick absorbed that. It sounded about right. None of the crew had wanted to kill the kid and he hadn’t been too into it, either, but Rip’s description of his future actions had been pretty dire. Besides, this was the longest speech Len had given since becoming Kronos, and he wanted to encourage more of that; he’d play along. 

“So we should have killed him, that’s what you’re saying?”

“No, of course not,” Len said, settling himself down into a more comfortable position. “You should do whatever feels right to you; you’re the boss. Besides, it’s like you all keep forgetting what Rip told us at the start of all this – time _wants_ to happen. You kill the beloved sole child of a benevolent dictator, you radicalize the dictator himself. He goes from not wanting to release the virus to being open to Savage’s influence. Five years later, having preyed on Tor Degaton’s growing paranoia and used it to eliminate his political opponents or potential opposition, Savage then positions himself as Tor Degaton’s sole heir and assassinates the man himself. The timeline continues, uninterrupted by the minor variation.”

Mick turned and stared at him. “If you knew this, why didn’t you _say_ anything?” he asked. “You know, _when we were planning it_?”

“Just because it’s hard to change the timeline doesn’t mean that it’s impossible,” Len told him. “I hadn’t collected all the facts by that point. Why do you think it’s been so obnoxiously difficult to kill Savage? You’re working against the timeline.”

“So this entire mission has been a waste of time, _that’s_ what you’re telling me.”

“No, merely that you need to expand your thinking if you want to succeed.” Len turned to look at him, eyes wide and soulless and lit with the disturbing light of the fanatic. “Mick, if you want to change this timeline, you only need to tell me. I can still do it.”

Mick frowned. He hated working under an external pressure and planning with less than complete information and this entire mission had been a constant exercise in both. But now he had access to the sort of information he needed; everything Rip knew, Len now knew too. He hated to admit it, but Rip might have had a point that he wasn’t using Len’s new knowledge, new abilities, to their full benefit in his desperation to find something of his old friend left inside Kronos’ shell. “ _How_?” he asked. “How would you change the timeline?”

Len smiled, beatific in his madness. “Per Degaton isn’t the issue,” he said. “Tor Degaton isn’t the issue. Palmer had the right idea all along – you can’t just change a man or two, you need to look at the _system_. Kasnia itself is the problem, the system of shareholding that consolidates power into the hands of the few, the natural extension of the tendency of institutions such as corporations to accrue power. Palmer’s mistake is in thinking the problem is the robotic army. It isn’t. That’s just the tool. The problem is the corporation itself. I’ve had Gideon compile a list of all the shareholders in the Kasnia Conglomerate; between the shareholders’ meeting and various associated activities, they’re all within a half-hour’s flight by jump ship, even the ones who are meant to be at a remove in the event of the hypothetical meteorite strike. Give me eight hours and they’ll all be dead.”

“Isn’t that the entire government?”

“Exactly. The infrastructure holding Kasnia together will crumble without guidance from above – the middle management will go on for a while, but they’d have to hold a general election if they want to elect a new Board, start from scratch. The chances of that happening while the population riots outside of Kasnia’s borders continue are miniscule. The entire country will split into factions, powerful secondary individuals will seek to take control – within six months, Kasnia will fall into a state of anarchy.”

“And that’s _better_?”

“If the goal is to stop Savage? Yes. He needs the strength of the Conglomerate to act as a launching pad to take over the world, otherwise he has to gather an army and do it piecemeal, and we’ve already seen that he’s not interested in doing things the hard way or he would have done it before, say during the Black Plague or something. Palmer takes out the robot army, I eliminate the shareholders, we get Sara to destroy the factory with the plans for the Armageddon virus – Savage’s rise to power is delayed by _centuries_.” He paused. “Of course, it’s very likely that the world will descend into some sort of second Dark Age. But you know how it is – omelets, eggs.”

Mick stayed quiet for a few minutes, thinking about it. Not thinking about giving the order – there was no way he was going to make Len the architect of the world’s Second Dark Age, thanks. Lenny would never forgive him when he returned to himself. Just, you know, thinking. It was an interesting hypothetical exercise. The world was very, very lucky that Mick was the one in charge, not Len. A universe where Len was in charge would be _deeply_ screwed up. “Just out of curiosity, is there any way to stop Savage’s rise to power in this time period _without_ destroying the world?”

Len thought about it. “No, not really,” he says. “It’s too close to the timeline, you know? The closer you are to the event you want to change, the hard it is to change it. Like the opposite of the butterfly effect. You kill the butterfly that flapped its wings, it never makes the hurricane. You go to ground zero of the hurricane? You’re fighting a hurricane.”

“So we should go back, not forward.”

“That’s right. Rip just wants to change this time period because he’s familiar with it. He’s from 2166, remember? 2147 is less than 20 years earlier. Whatever time he was originally from, whatever pocket the Time Masters raised him in, he’s got to be put back into the timeline at the appropriate moment in order to age. This is it. This is his zeitgeist, his teen years. The period that had the most influence in his life.”

“So it’d be like the two of us trying to change the 1980s?” Mick thought about it and grunted. “Lots of things I’d like to change about the 80s.”

“ _Exactly_.”

“Huh.” Mick stood up after a moment, brushing the dust off his pants. “Let’s go back to the Waverider. Whatever Rip’s going to do, he’s going to do – if it’s not going to affect the timeline, we may as well keep an eye on the others and make sure they stay out of trouble. Plus, we can check out what’s on future TV.”

“It’s terrible,” Len said with the first flickers of real emotion that he’d had yet, even if that emotion was distaste. “But if you think that’s bad, you should hear the _music_.”

\-----------------------------

“Mr. Rory!” Rip yells over the shooting. “ _Control your monster_!”

Mick snarls wordlessly and shoots a wave of heat back at the mob of anarchists and looters that had descended upon them. Did Len have to start a fight with _everyone_? 2046 was a shithole. Lots of pretty fire, anarchy and fun, sure, but Lenny just kept going around picking fights and getting the crap beat out of everyone. Endless violence – just his cup of tea. Mick had gotten bored of that sort of crap when he was in his twenties; hanging around Len would do that to you.

This time, Lenny had really outdone himself. The leader – Deathstroke? Son of Deathstroke? – had put a price on their heads, and it was like the entire city turned out its bowels to get them all. Kendra had nearly been shot out of the sky. Sara was walking with a limp, but kept fighting. Ray’s suit was reaching critical. Even the Waverider itself had taken a few hits, and one of the engines was frosted over from a stray hit from Len, removing their primary means of escape.

Len, of course, was standing in the middle of the crowd, freezing anyone who came too close to him solid and lashing out with blasts of cold, grinning and laughing as he went. The ground everywhere within line of sight became treacherous and slippery with ice, hindering enemy and ally alike.

Goddamn meta powers.

“ _Len_ ,” Mick cries out angrily. “ _Get back here_!”

Len trots over to him. “I like this era, boss,” he says cheerfully, apparently entirely unaware of the damage that he’d wreaked on their entire crew. “Can we stick around a little longer? There’s some stuff I think you’ll like to see–”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mick spits. “Okay, that’s it. Len, you’re out. Go back to the Waverider, wait for the rest of us.”

“What? But I –”

“ _Now_.”

Len stands still, reluctant to move. Mick needs to come up with a plan to overwhelm the armies, but it was like everything Len touched went out of control. He needs _time_. He needs Len _not to start shit_. But no, Len picks _now_ to decide to quibble about asking how high when Mick said jump. Len has terrible timing. As always, nowadays. 

“Did you not hear me or something?” Mick snarls. “Come on, come with me.” He reachs out and grabs Len roughly by the arm, the icy cold vanishing away as soon as his hand comes within range. At least Len still knew better than to piss Mick off even further by icing him by accident.

Mick marchs Len into the Waverider and shoved him none too gently into his room without another word. “Gideon,” he calls out on his way out, still smarting at the need to have to bench one of their MVPs right at a key moment. But there was nothing for it. “Make sure he doesn’t leave, will you?” 

“Understood, Mr. Rory,” Gideon responded pleasantly.

It took another six hours, but between Rip and Mick, they managed to come up with a decent plan to escape the mob army, save the Waverider, recruit the two Arrows to fight back (that was Sara’s contribution) and everyone’s still alive. It’s a victory, albeit one mostly won getting out of a situation they created, but Mick’s willing to take it.

Mick’s feeling pretty good right up until Gideon’s voice chimes into his private quarters just as he’s starting to relax. “Mr. Rory, Mr. Snart has requested your presence.”

“Christ,” Mick sighs. He’s beat and he’s tired and he really doesn’t want to deal with Len’s bitching right now. “Can it wait?”

“He is very emphatic that it be now,” the computer said apologetically.

Mick walks over, bracing himself against the wall as the Waverider takes off and returns to the time stream. Len is pacing frantically back and forth. There are bloody handmarks on the walls and shards of ice everywhere, as most of the furniture that wasn’t made of the impenetrable substance of the walls has been frozen and shattered. 

Mick looks at the wreckage with a jaundiced eye. “Seriously, Len?” he asks. “You lose control of your powers or just lose your temper again?”

Len spins to face him, and he’s furious, unsurprisingly. “What the hell was that?” he snarls. “You locked me in here and wouldn’t let me out – and did we just take off? I _told_ you wanted to show you something. Tell Rip to go back.”

Mick doesn’t want to deal with this right now; he wants to _sleep_. “Len,” he says as patiently as he can. “You heard Rip; that timeline wasn’t even stable. It’s probably not even in existence anymore.”

“You _locked me in here_ ,” Len says, and he’s really angry about this. “Why?”

“You were out of control, Len.”

“I’m _always_ out of control, Mick! You’ve never _benched_ me before.”

“Goddamnit, Len,” Mick says, getting angry. “Don’t you put this on me. Couldn’t you just control yourself for once in your godforsaken life? Don’t you even realize you nearly got Sara and Kendra killed?”

“Who cares?” Len snarls back. “ _I’m_ your team, don’t you forget that. Don’t you dare pick them over me; I won’t let you. I’ll kill them all first.”

“It isn’t about picking favorites, Len! I was just being logical – you were being a danger to yourself, a danger to everyone around you. You were a danger to the plan.”

Len’s eyes glitter with anger. “Fuck the plan, Mick. And fuck you too. You do remember that we’re partners, right? I may call you boss, but my opinion is just as valuable as yours.”

“Sometimes I need to call some audibles, Len,” Mick says, tired and angry and just wanting this day to be over. “You need someone to hold your leash, and that’s me. You don’t need to know everything, and you don’t get a say in everything. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“Yeah, Mick. I give you my leash, and you care for me first and foremost, that’s the trade-off. I’m not the one who’s backed down on his side of the deal.” Len’s face twisted into a sneer. “Your _new_ partner called me a monster. Did you even notice?”

“Len –” 

“If you’re just going to make excuses for him, get out of here.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean –”

“Mick. I’m going to warn you only once. Get out of here, or I will _hurt_ you.”

Mick leaves. As the door closed behind him, he hears Len scream in rage and the sound of ice spreading, cracking, shattering. 

He hesitates for a second, wondering if he should say something, but the siren song of his bed and sleep is too much. _Len’ll be fine_ , he thinks to himself. _He’s just pissed he’d missed the big fight in 2046. He just needs a little time to himself, wear out his anger on the walls. He’ll be fine in the morning._

_Everything will go back to the way it’s always been._

He couldn’t be more wrong. Len stops listening to him. He doesn’t get any less out of control – they’re stuck in the temporal zone, but “friendly” sparring with him becomes increasingly more likely to result in someone needing to go to Gideon for treatment. His temper becomes ever more unpredictable. He pisses everyone off with his comments. 

He sells out the rest of the crew to time pirates with a snarl on his lips and not even the slightest hint of repentance.

Mick knows he needs to handle this, somehow, but he doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sorry he benched Len back in 2046, and Len’s just going to have to live with that.

Rip tells Mick that he knows of a secluded spot where Mick could take care of him, somewhere where Len wouldn’t be able to hurt their families back in 2016 in a fit of rage that he’d regret later. 

_You’re never late if you own a time machine_ , Mick reasons to himself. _Len won’t even notice that we’re gone._

_I’ll have time to fix this when we’ve finished the mission._

\--------------------------------

They’re in the Wild West, just like all those stupid serials Mick used to watch when he was a kid. He’s got a hat and a bandana and a six shooter, and he’s got a posse behind him to call his own. That’s all he’s ever wanted, really, a gun at his side, a challenge to face, a team to call his own.

It tastes like dust in his mouth.

Lenny walks by his side, as always, dressed all in black, his Kronos gun looped over his back like a rifle and a flintlock in his holster; he let Mick pick out his outfit without comment. Not a single _Seven Samurais_ reference. Mick hates looking at him; he doesn’t move the way Len did, all slick speed and grace and barely contained energy. He’s the stereotype now, the stone-cold killer with a face like a glacier. 

Len murders someone within an hour of their arrival at the saloon. In defense of his teammate, so at least he’s still following orders. Still, he didn’t _have_ to kill the man; Mick knows how deadly accurate Len’s aim is – he could’ve gone for the gun instead, gotten the same result.

Mick wonders if Len just likes killing people now.

A perfect weapon, obedient and accurate and without remorse; it’d taken Mick one bad decision to do what Lewis Snart had tried and failed to do for nearly two decades. 

Lenny would have liked this era _so much_ ; that’s the part that hurts. He would have been shoulder-to-shoulder with the boy scout, playing up the black-clad loner desperado to Ray’s upstanding sheriff, dropping lines from every movie he could think of that would fit and trying to fit in ones that were totally inappropriate (Mick was never getting the part of his life spent watching _Aliens vs. Cowboys_ back, but _Cowboy Bebop_ had been pretty cool).

As it was, Mick has his hands full managing the trouble the others on the team kept getting into, which at least means he doesn’t have too much time to dwell – Rip has some unnecessarily convoluted past with one of the cowboys they bump into, which Mick cares exactly zero about, but Kendra has managed to talk herself both into and out of a relationship with the Haircut Kid and seems to think he can instruct her love life with the same skill he applies to planning heists.

(He tells her that she needs to get a grip on who she is by herself before worrying about who she is with other people. Besides, he points out that the whole point of this mission was to escape the treadmill of reincarnation-Carter-death that she’d been on, so why force herself back on that ongoing tragedy on the say-so of someone whose chance to change things had passed over a century ago? Kendra had hugged him, said “Thank you, boss!”, and skipped out of the room. Good to know he doesn’t screw up _everything_ he touches.)

Jax gets himself lassoed. Mick is actually rendered speechless for a minute. Did that actually just happen?

“Want me to go get him, boss?” Len asks. “Just say the word.”

“You can’t be serious,” Jonah Hex snaps. “There are over thirty of them; we have leverage we can use to trade. Live to fight another day.”

“I can live to fight today, tomorrow, and the day after that, and still go get him,” Len says, not looking away from Mick. “As cowboy here says, there’s _only_ thirty of them. It’s dark and they’ve been drinking; between that and the reputation this area has for tall tales, no one would believe any technological distortion. I could get Jax out with minimal casualties – 30, maybe 40% of the gang.”

Mick thinks it over, firing a few final shots back at them and controlling the horse with his knees as they ride off further away. Hex is staring at Len like he’s insane. “Yeah, you probably could,” Mick says, ignoring Hex’s little huff of disbelief. “But I don’t know what timeline effect that would have, even in a fragment or whatever it is we’re in. Killing one guy in a bar fight’s a pretty big space away from killing a dozen.”

He lifted his hand to his collar, clicking on Cisco’s ever-reliable comms that he never let his team go anywhere without. “Jax, how’s it going? You need an immediate evac?”

“No sweat, boss,” Jax muttered under his voice. “They hog-tied me and tossed me in a tent. I’m getting flashbacks to middle school summer camp, but that’s about all the trauma they seem to be going in for – they’re real interested in arranging a trade, even if you aren’t.”

“Then we’ll see you in a few hours. The Waverider’s less than five minutes away on the top speed of the jump ship, so give a holler if anyone starts making any threatening noises.”

Len leaned in towards Mick. “I _know_ I taught you how to get out of a hogtie,” he says, scowling a little in concentration as he tries to dig up the now-distant memories. “I recommend this as an excellent opportunity for practice.”

“But nothing that’ll get you in trouble; no escape attempts unless you’re sure you’ll succeed,” Mick orders. “We’ll get you back tomorrow.”

“You so sure about that?” Hex drawls. “You’ve still got to set up a quick-draw, you know; guns at high noon. Any of you time travelers got any past experience with that?”

Len’s hand shoots out and he has Hex’s own gun pointed at Hex’ head two seconds later. His eyes shine a little mad in the moonlight and there’s a little smile dancing around his lips. 

Mick never thought he’d be happy to see his partner’s recurring tendency towards unnecessary violence, that it’d be a good sign, a familiar sign. “Down, Lenny,” he orders, smiling fondly at him. “Friend, not food, remember?”

“You’re crazier than a half-drowned raccoon in a hatter’s workshop,” Hex observed. 

Ray volunteers to do the shoot-out. Mick hastily waves his team – all gaping in mute, horrified disbelief – into silence before they can protest; there’s no need to embarrass the kid. Rip insists on doing it himself instead. 

Hex looks between Rip and Mick, and sidles over to Mick. “Hunter’s good, real good,” he says casually. “He’ll probably be able to pull it off.”

“I agree,” Mick replied.

“Your boy’s better.”

“That’s why he’s the back-up plan,” Mick says. “We’re not leaving Jax behind any way you cut it, and I never much cared for honoring rules of engagement.” 

“What did you _do_ , before you got into this whole time travel business with Hunter?” Hex asks, sounding mildly impressed. “Hunter talked a big game last time he was here, but you ain’t no Time Master. They’re all about rules, ‘specially about non-interference.”

Mick’s lips lifted in a smirk, even as the pain of Lenny’s absence pulsed like a missing limb. “I’m a thief and an arsonist. Oh, and I manage a team of superheroes in my spare time. So I’ve got a bit of a different perspective.”

“Huh,” Hex says. “Well, if you end up needing to call in your back-up, I got dibs on that newfangled revolver of Rip’s.”

“Done deal.”

The problem comes later, after the duel. The Hunters, which Len had mentioned as likely being the Time Masters’ first form of reprisals and which Rip had brought them here to avoid, had found them. 

Len swings out from the second story window he had been lurking in, landing with cat-like grace right before the approaching Hunters. Mick looks around the area, calculating the best strategy as Len buys them time to get into position. He gestures, and his team takes heed, moving where he wants them. Sara takes point, creeping up behind Len, Kendra backing her up; Firestorm grab onto each other and prep to take to the air at a moment’s notice. Kendra from below if needed, Firestorm from above; Sara and Len in front, Ray from the left and Mick himself from the right – Rip and Hex could do as they like, but on Mick’s mark they’d blitz through the Hunters, taking them down as fast and hard as possible. 

“ _Traitor_!” one of the Hunters shouts when they see Len, their voice distorted by his helmet.

“I’ve never changed sides in my life,” Len replies, starkly amused. “You want me? Come get me. Me, I’m just waiting on my boss to pick how he wants you to die – and how fast.”

“Even if you manage defeat us, Kronos, you’ll never win,” the leader of the Hunters snarls. “The Time Masters have initiated the Omega Protocol. They’re gonna hunt your younger self down like a dog.”

“I’m so scared,” Len mocks. “I’ll hunt the Pilgrim down and rip her head off if she tries.”

The Hunter laughs. “She’ll kill your father,” he says. Mick’s wondering if they ever knew Len at all, to think that _that_ would be an effective threat _ever_ , when the man continues, “They’ll do it early enough that you’ll never be born, neither you nor that sister of yours.”

Len goes quiet, the dark and deadly quiet of Kronos. “You just bought yourself another hour of dying time,” he says lowly. “Just for thinking that thought.” 

The man laughs again. “Who’s going to do it?” he jeers. “You? That boss of yours? He’s got an Omega Protocol on him, too.”

Len stops moving entirely. That’s not characteristic of him, either as Lenny or as Kronos. 

“The Pilgrim will kill him before you ever met him,” the Hunter goads Len. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt at all; you won’t even remember who he was.”

Len screams and everything goes white. 

When Mick’s eyes clear, the town is covered in a light layer of frost, and the lead Hunter is dead already, his face burnt black with frostbite in the shape of an ungloved hand. 

Len’s fighting the other two Hunters, his teeth pulled back into a painfully familiar snarl, his movements as graceful as ever but even quicker, jerkier; he’s not controlled, he’s not planning his next move, he’s not thinking. He’s _enraged_.

God, _Lenny_.

“Get them,” Mick roars, and his team moves. 

Ray shrinks down and shoots forward like a bullet, just like Mick advised him; Firestorm backs his play, acting to distract the leftmost Hunter by faking an attack that draws him away from Len and right into Ray’s target range. 

Sara and Kendra move in tandem, mace and quarterstaff; with no need for an aerial attack, they utilize their flexibility and the months of training they’ve had together in the rec room. It’d taken Mick ages to beat it into their heads that they didn’t _need_ to utilize Kendra’s wings if it wasn’t the best option, that Sara didn’t always have to fight alone, and now they used that painstakingly earned coordination to box in the Hunter Len’s fighting. 

Faced with opponents on three sides, the Hunter never sees Mick coming in, Len stepping back at just the right moment, all those old patterns trained deep into their bones snapping back into place and for a second there everything is just as it used to be, that moment of perfect harmony. Mick drives the long spike he picked up into the Hunter’s chest, and that’s it, the battle is done.

He lets the body fall between them, looks around. His team’s not taking anything for granted; Kendra takes off to survey the fighting ground, going left as Firestorm goes right. 

Hex is looking impressed; Rip – who fired off maybe four shots – is looking like he’s torn between pride in his team and envy at Mick’s easy command of them. 

Mick doesn’t care. Kronos’ ice has cracked, even if only for a second, and he’ll be damned if he lets it close back over before he has a chance to reach inside and pull his Lenny back out. 

Lenny’s eyes flicker to his, and his hands are shaking, he’s so angry. “She’ll never touch you,” he says, and it has all the weight of a vow. “ _None of them will_.”

“They won’t get me, Lenny,” Mick promises. “We’ll gut them all first.”

“Damn right,” Len snarls. “They don’t even get to say your name.”

Mick puts a hand on each shoulder, turns Len to look into his eyes, says what he’s been wanting to say since he figured out how much of a mistake he’d made. 

“We won’t let them. It’s you and me, Lenny,” he says. “You and me against the world.”

This time, when Len’s eyes shine, it is with adoration, not madness. 

\--------------------------------

To say Mick is not happy with Rip’s plan is an understatement.

He’s being a good boy and hustled Rip into his office before saying anything, but he’d bet the score of a lifetime that every single member of the crew has their ears pressed to the door.

“– cannot believe you sold yourself as an expert on time manipulation,” he snarls. “Christ, what happened the first time the Time Masters send you out, you accidentally swing by the 20s and tell Adolf Hitler, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great idea –’”

“I _am_ an expert at manipulating the timeline, Mr. Rory,” Rip snaps. “This entire affair would have been over significantly faster if you would all _listen to me_ –”

“Oh yeah?” Mick shoots back. “What’s the reason we can’t go back to ancient Egypt and stop the whole thing with Savage before he gets his powers? Oh, wait, that’s because you _messed that up_ …”

“There simply is no other choice!” Rip exclaims, waving his hands in the air. “The fact that you have suborned the entire team to your devices, Mr. Rory, does _not_ mean that you know everything there is to know about time travel. The Omega Protocols are always deadly and _always_ effective –”

There’s an audible snort from the door, followed by several shushing noises. 

“– and the more time we spend arguing about it now, the more likely it is that the Pilgrim will be able to successfully eliminate our younger selves, removing us from the timeline one by one.” Rip crosses his arms. “We have no choice but to collect our younger selves from the timeline and place them in a safe spot.”

“Because the Pilgrim has only one shot at killing us for hitherto unstated timey-wimey reasons, huh?” Mick retorts.

Audible giggling from the door, along with what may or may not be several individuals _who should be more mature than this_ whispering “Exterminate! Exterminate!” to each other, because Mick Rory is dumb enough to go travelling with a group of nerds.

“I have explained already, the timeline could suffer from irreparable temporal damage if the Pilgrim makes multiple attempts –”

“You’ve already said that we’re not important to the timeline,” Mick points out, reasonably in his view. “If we’re not important, no one will notice if we die or not die at any given point in our lives, and all of us have come close to dying plenty of times. Say Sara doesn’t get resurrected; you could stop that from happening by destroying her corpse at any point after her initial death and there’d be no difference if you did it on Tuesday one week or Wednesday the next and if you go in around two-thirty in the morning no one’ll be there to see you do it on either day. Having only one shot makes no sense.”

“Regardless of if it makes _sense_ , it is certainly what the Time Masters believe – and let me say that your knowledge of the appropriate time to go grave-robbing is exceedingly disturbing –”

“ _It was an example_.”

“–at any rate, I’ve already located the appropriate place to put your younger selves for the duration of our mission.”

“Thereby risking deleting us entirely from the timeline if the ship happens to crack an engine again because we didn’t get back in time before the timeline solidifies. No thanks.”

“As I have _already explained_ , we have no choice. The Pilgrim is _as we speak_ making an attempt on your younger self’s life. There is a Refuge we can take the children to – it’s where I was raised, where the orphans who grow up to become Time Masters are raised –”

There is a loud squawk from outside the door.

“…have they been listening to us?” Rip asks, alarmed. Mick sighs and goes over to pull the door open.

He can’t help quirking a grin when he sees that everyone in the group magically appears to be standing exactly three steps away from the door doing their best impression of “casual lounging.” 

“Stein, your book’s upside down,” he points out. “And Ray, Kendra? ‘Make out with me, the heat’s coming’ doesn’t actually work, ever.” He just gives Jax and Sara, which appear to have tangled in each other’s legs on their way out of the pile they had no doubt been in by the door and were pretending that they were totally sitting in each other’s laps on the ground on purpose, a slow disappointed headshake. 

Lenny, of course, is still sitting right by the door with a smirk on his face and a goddamn listening glass in his hand because _he knows no shame_.

“Lenny, any suggestions?” he drawls. He arches his eyebrows at Len, wondering if Len got the same idea that he did. 

Len tilts his head to the side. “Yeah,” he says, eyes starting to light up, small vicious smile tugging at his lips. Mick’s not going to kid himself that Lenny’s gone back to being a stable as he was before, but there’s hope for it, now. He’s going to make sure of it. “I hear you loud and clear. Can I borrow the jump ship and Kendra?”

“They’re yours. Rip, the rest of us will go with your plan, dumb as it is. Where do we think the Pilgrim will strike first?”

“I calculate a 97% chance that the Pilgrim will attack Mr. Rory’s younger self first,” Gideon piped up. “The coordinates are attached.”

Mick took one look and groaned. 

“I see you know the period already,” Stein observes. “What happened then?”

“My entire family burned to death in a fire,” Mick replied with a sigh. “Excellent kick-off to a lifetime of pyromania and therapist sessions.”

“You got therapy?” Jax asked, surprised.

“Of course I get therapy,” Mick replied. “I have a mental illness. You refuse to go to the doctor when you’ve broken your arm? Anyway – Lenny, Kendra, get going. Kendra, Lenny’ll explain along the way.” He thinks about it for a second. “Oh, and Len?”

Len, who had risen up and turned to leave, turned back with a questioning expression on his face.

“You remember that present Cisco gave you before we left? I think it’s time.”

Len’s face splits into a grin – okay, they still need to work on him _not doing that_ when he smiles – and he bounds out the door. 

The rest of them go to one of the worst nights of Mick’s life to fight the Pilgrim off. Turns out she can apparently “micro-manipulate” time, which is just…Mick has no words. 

“Rip,” Mick says, circling around the Pilgrim warily, holding his heat gun and one of Len’s Kronos guns strapped to thigh as a back-up. “You’d tell us if we lived in the Matrix, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rip said, firing at the Pilgrim uselessly. “And is now really the time?”

“Sure it is,” Ray chirps. “What if there’s a glitch in the Matrix?”

“Hey, we _are_ on a farm,” Sara says, lunging in with her quarterstaff. “Tell me, what is it called when a cow gets déjà vu?” The Pilgrim throws her backwards and she rolls with it, springing back to her feet. “The feeling that you’ve heard this bullshit before!”

The Pilgrim sneers at all of them. 

Mick’s watch goes off with a tell-tale beep. Len had said he needed two hours at the minimum, and they’d kept the Pilgrim talking and taunting for a least that long.

“You’ve got to tell Lenny that one,” Mick says to Sara deliberately. “You’ve got the same crappy sense of humor.”

You could see the moment when the Pilgrim realized that Len wasn’t among the people fighting.

“Where is Kronos?” she asks angrily. “Did he abandon you so soon?”

“Nah,” Mick replies. “He just learned from the best. Now, how did you put it just now – ‘if it’s of any comfort, you won’t feel a thing’?”

She stares at him, not understanding for a moment before her eyes widened in horror and she rears back.

“See, my Lenny might not be the brains of the outfit,” Mick says with satisfaction. “But funny enough, between Rip and him we’ve got all the info we need on people like you. Like where you grew up. A whole orphanage, just for Time Masters – and their assassins, I’d wager.”

“That’s impossible,” she snarls, but her eyes are white all around the pupil. “The Time Masters have erased my past from the history books, obliterated any mention of me; no one knows where I’m from. You can’t kill _me_ in the past. _I have no past_.”

Rip looks at Mick in surprise as well. “I thought we were _against_ killing children, Mr. Rory,” he hisses.

“Christ, do none of you people trust me?” Mick tells him. “Kendra’s some sort of temporal dead spot because of her reincarnation sequence, so Miss Pilgrim here can’t spot her when she moves, right?”

“Yes, but I still must object –”

“The boss isn’t in the business of killing kids,” Sara snaps at Rip. “ _Obviously_.”

“Then what –”

“I’m mostly just stalling for time,” Mick says, shrugging. “We’re not going to kill a kid, we’re just going to blow up her timeship once we figure out when it’s parked. Except Lenny and Kendra took the jump ship to go blow it up yesterday. You all do remember that yesterday still counts the ‘past’, right?”

The Pilgrim twitches in rage, takes a step forward. Then she chokes. Bursts into a fizzle of blue light as Kendra and Len blow up her ship a day earlier.

Rip holsters his gun. “Clever, Mr. Rory,” he says with a scowl. “But you’re overlooking the obvious.”

“How’s that?” Mick says mildly.

The air above them shivers and the jump ship shoots back into their time, landing a few meters away. Len and Kendra fall out the door, both laughing uproariously.

“Boss!” Kendra calls out. “In my next life, can I _please_ use Cisco’s rocket launcher to kill Savage? I promise I’ll be good!”

“Why wait till the next life?” Len replies, stupid grin on his face looking almost normal for once. “We still have time in _this_ life.”

“That was _so awesome_. Boom!”

“You brought a rocket launcher on my – you know what, I’m not even going to ask,” Rip said. “Regardless, Mr. Rory, you’ve overlooked the obvious: the Omega Protocols are still applicable. We still need to rescue our past selves lest the Time Masters send another assassin.”

“Yeeeeeah,” Mick says. “I got an idea for that, actually. But I’m going to tell you up front that you’re going to hate it.”

Rip crossed his arms. “What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

“You saw her face when we threatened her with her own tricks; I’m willing to bet the Time Masters have the same feelings on the subject. You ever heard about the concept of ‘mutually assured destruction’…?”

\------------------------------------

Mick sat at the part of the storage hold that he’s turned into his workshop and started ripping into one of the secondary projects he left sitting around. He doesn’t really care what he’s working on, he just needed to use his hands. This is his safe space on the Waverider: no Gideon, no cameras, no receivers of any sort that Cisco’s trackers could locate, made to look as close as possible to his safe houses back home. 

Len followed him in and perched on the couch next to him. The signs of Kronos are still there; he falls into the perfect stillness of the waiting sniper when not called upon to move, zoning out at random moments. A lethal combination of killer training and PTSD. Mick doesn’t care what Len says or how much Rip assures him that getting back to 2016 would significantly help regulate Len’s mental state, when they get home, Len is visiting the goddamn shrink. 

Sara too, if she’s going to be joining them. And Ray, and Kendra, and…yeah, maybe he should ask Rip to drop them all of them on his shrink’s doorstep. Group therapy was a thing, right?

Len’s still crap at using silence to get people to talk first, though.

“So what’s the issue?” he asked. 

Mick grunted. Pulls out the mechanical guts of the device he’s holding – Cisco’s prototype heat sink, it looks like. Whatever, that thing never worked anyway. 

“You know the rest of the team nominated me to come in here,” Len pointed out.

Mick paused. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. They’re either very trusting in the power of friendship or they think I can guilt trip you into answering. I don’t care which one works, but you should give in now. What’s the issue?”

Mick sighed and puts down the heat sink. “It’s too easy,” he said, scowling. “It’s _all_ too easy.”

“The whole empathy shtick we pulled with the Cassie kid, you mean?” Len asked. 

“That, too,” Mick agreed, nodding. “None of that made any sense. Savage not telling her about releasing the virus? Practically served her up to us on a platter, even though it’s obviously the first thing anyone would try. Also–” he stopped.

“Also?”

“She called you Mr. Snart,” Mick said reluctantly. He’d been hoping not to go into this with Len of all people, but he needs to get it out of his head, talk it out. Something isn’t adding up and with all their lives at risk, he needed to wrap his head around it and fast. 

“Yeah?” Len asked, tilting his head to the side questioningly. “That’s why we brought her back to the ship. Savage told her.”

“I call you Len or Lenny,” Mick pointed out. “Stein and Sara call you Leonard. Jax, Ray and Kendra call you Cold. Rip…”

“Usually prefers to talk to you instead of to me direct, unless he’s calling me names,” Len observed, starting to frown himself. “You know, you’re right. I can’t think of any time he’s called me by my last name in Savage’s presence. But if that’s the case, where’d he hear of me?”

“That’s one problem,” Mick agreed. “But thinking of that made me think of another issue: the Time Masters. They’ve _also_ been too easy. I mean, why’d they send _you_ after us?”

Len put his chin on his knees. “I’m very good at what I do,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but if we’re irrelevant to the timeline, why bother with capturing you and doing all that? They could’ve sent the Pilgrim after our younger selves as early as our first mission, when they sent you after us, or in our second, or third.”

“Even if we have a miniscule impact on the timeline, we still have an impact,” Len replied. “Maybe not as ourselves per se, but we could have taken an action that impacted someone who _was_ relevant to the timeline: Flash, for instance. Time Masters are sensitive that sort of bullshit.”

“Then why threaten us with the Pilgrim at all?”

Len shrugged. “No clue. Those of us that worked for them; we’re just tools to the Time Masters,” he said. “Barely even pawns. Certainly not high up enough to hear their actual plans.”

Mick’s starting to think he might be starting have an insight, though. “Len,” he said slowly. “How many time fragments would you say there are? That we could hide in?”

Len shrugged. “Hundreds?” he guessed. “Thousands? More? I don’t know. Why?”

“How’d the Hunters find us, then?”

Len snorted. “Have you _met_ Rip?” he said, unimpressed. “Of course he’d go back to what he knows best.”

“Exactly,” Mick agreed. “It’s just like fighting Thawne with the Flash. Thawne knew everything Barry would do and put him under an artificial time pressure to make him more likely to go with his first instincts. Rip’s still playing with the Time Masters’ playbook and they know it better than he does.”

“If we’d taken our past selves to Rip’s Refuge, we would be under that time pressure for fear that we’d get removed from the timeline,” Len said thoughtfully. “Only reason we’re not is ‘cause you and me came up with other plans, and they weren’t expecting us to defeat the Pilgrim so fast.”

“Defeating the Hunters was a piece of cake. The Pilgrim wasn’t that much harder, and you weren’t even trying,” Mick said, feeling his way around. “They’re not hunting us down or trying to stop us, they’re _herding_ us – to _now_ , the only period Rip knows for a fact that Savage was around. Now’s the time period when defeating Savage would have the _least_ effect on the timeline. Rip said he was the right-hand man behind countless historical dictators; removing him from history earlier could have some pretty significant effects, and we know the Time Masters don’t want to risk that. Similarly, everything we've done we've done already; it's a lot less risky than one of us dying in the past.”

“But if they wanted Savage defeated at this time, why not just help Rip out in the first place?”

“Well, they don’t want Savage defeated,” Mick replied thoughtlessly, then stopped, struck with realization. “Len. It’s not just a policy of non-interference. _They don’t want Savage defeated_.”

“So?”

“They weren’t expecting Rip to go rogue, but now that he has, they’re playing him like a violin.” Mick’s fingers clenched. “What’s next? He’s ruined our lives with the Omega Protocols. He’s captured Savage, who had Carter all prepped for when Kendra showed up. As long as Savage doesn’t return to the timeline, his family should theoretically survive. What would you guess is Rip’s next step?”

Len scowled. “Probably something stupid to try to save us.”

“Try losing ten IQ points and try again.”

“Ouch, Mick, that’s harsh,” Len smirked. “I don’t know. Trade Savage to the Time Masters in exchange for getting the Omega Protocols called off?”

Mick nodded. “Hey, Len,” he said casually. “How’d Savage know your last name?”

Len’s mouth dropped open. “Those little bastards are in it with him. They set us up,” he whispered. “ _Those little_ -”

Mick lunged forward and caught Len by both shoulders, pressing him back down to the ground. “ _No_ , Lenny.” 

“Give me one good reason not to go after them right now,” Len snarled. “ _One good reason_. That’s where Savage got the technology to fuck with Carter’s head, I’ll bet you our next score; no one fucks with your head like the Time Masters.”

Yeah, that’s what Mick had been thinking.

“Len, no,” he said firmly, then smiled. “I’ve got a _better_ idea.”

“Does your idea involve Cisco’s rocket launcher?”

“I can make it work.”

Compromise _was_ the basis of all good partnerships, after all.

\---------------------------

Mick has never been so happy to see Central City before in his life. 

After that whole clusterfuck at the Vanishing Point, he was done. He was out. He was going back to something nice and relaxing, like planning heists. He’d even let the hero-side foil them, he doesn’t care. He needs a vacation from his _life_.

Rip dropped them off, his eyes still wet with tears and coat still blackened with soot, taking the reawakened Carter back to his own time period to look for his own version of Kendra. Mick hoped that future Kendra would give him the same kind brush-off that his girl had. Rip had reason to be happy: Savage’s death at Kendra and Carter’s joined hands at the Vanishing Point had taken place before his family’s death; without the interference of the corrupt Time Masters, their deaths were no longer inevitable.

Between his reunion with his family and the fact that the majority of the Time Masters were still picking up the leftover pieces of their organization, stumbling through the realization of how their leadership had perverted their responsibilities, Mick figured Rip had his hands full for the foreseeable future in his timeline. 

(Hell, forget what they’d done to the Vanishing Point itself; the Time Masters were probably still recovering from Ray’s excruciatingly long and earnest speech about why the Jedi were doomed to fall in the face of the Sith because of their alienation of necessary emotional development bonds and how the lessons of Star Wars should be applied to their upcoming organizational reform. Mick’s pretty sure that if Len hadn’t frozen their boots to the ground, they would’ve fled.)

Mick flipped his comm on the broader spectrum on instinct, checked to make sure there weren’t any radio silence lights on, and said, “Hey, we’re back. How’s it been –”

“Oh _thank god_ ,” Cisco immediately burst onto the comms. “You have no idea how badly we’ve screwed everything up.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mick said blankly even as Len burst out laughing behind him.

“We need your help in dealing with Zoom!”

“ _Zoom_? Cisco, we’ve talked about your stupid naming thing. I know I’ve agreed to let you keep it up, but that one just sounds like a bad car commercial.”

“No, no, no, I didn’t come up with it! It’s the Earth-2 speedster, remember? From when our duplicates came over?”

“I had so very nearly managed to forget about that,” Mick said sadly. “Did you guys put into action the plan I made to rescue the girl?”

“Oh, yeah, that part worked out just fine, actually. It might be the only thing that worked out fine. There’s this guy, this other-world Flash, his name is Jay Garrick…except his name isn’t Jay Garrick, it’s Hunter Zoloman, and he’s actually a _serial killer_.”

“Hold up a minute, Ramon,” Mick says, then turns his head. “Lenny, you’re gonna bust something – possibly this roof – if you keep laughing so hard.”

Len has curled up into a tiny ball on the ground, just rocking back and forth, tears streaming down his face and freezing into drops of ice that _clink_ onto the ground around him. “This is amazing,” he gasps. “Just imagine if the Time Masters _had_ deleted you from the timeline; we’d all be at Armageddon by now.”

“Shut up. Ramon, is there an active crisis now?”

“Well, no, not at this exact minute, but Barry had to trade away his speed!”

“That doesn’t even make any _sense_ , I thought his genetics - you know what, never mind. Listen, I’m on my way to STAR Labs. Just…don’t break anything until I get there, okay?”

“Oh, yeah, that reminds me, you remember how the other universe me said I had, like, vibing abilities? Apparently I can reach between universes now!”

“Well, _don’t do that_ until I get a full sit rep. For the love of God, we were blundering through time with no direction, some mad scientists, a reincarnated bird, and a crazy ice meta to fight both an immortal man and a quasi-immortal organization of time travelers – _how did you manage to screw up more than we did_?”

“We’re very, very talented?” Cisco offered meekly.

Mick clicked off his comm and looked at his crew – all of them, standing behind him and grinning widely at him. Lenny, Stein, Jax, Sara, Kendra, even Ray. With them plus the hero-side, he could probably take over the world if he wanted. The pile of still uncategorized Time Master tech they had ‘appropriated’ in their invasion of the Vanishing Point would probably help, too.

He almost felt bad for this Zoom person.

“It’s only a pity that Mr. Hunter has taken away the Waverider,” Stein said thoughtfully. “The ability to travel through time would be extremely useful in this circumstance.”

“Rip always said that those sorts of micro-adjustments are more trouble than they’re worth,” Ray reminded him, then sighed. “But it _was_ really cool travelling in time.”

Len sat up, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking like a mischievous imp. “Actually, come to think of it,” he drawled. “I do believe I stashed the time ship I was using as Kronos somewhere in this time period.”

“ _First_ we take care of the incipient supervillain,” Mick said. “ _Then_ we can worry about finding your time ship.”

“But we _are_ going to find it, right?” Ray asked eagerly.

Mick looked around at all the smiling faces, _none_ of which seemed to have learned anything from the past few months.

“We’re using it for vacations only,” he said. “And that’s _final_.”

“Yes, boss!”

**Author's Note:**

> This is all I have planned for this series so far, but as always, if you have suggestions for missing scenes or additional storylines you'd like to see, let me know either here or at robininthelabyrinth on tumblr.


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